The tiger in front

India can learn much from China's breakneck economic expansion. But it has valuable lessons for China, too, argues Simon Long (interviewed here)

HOME to nearly two-fifths of humanity, two neighbouring countries, India and China, are two of the world's fastest-growing economies. The world is taking notice. In December, a report by America's National Intelligence Council likened their emergence in the early 21st century to the rise of Germany in the 19th and America in the 20th, with “impacts potentially as dramatic”.

Comparisons between the two are inevitable. Both are poor, largely agricultural, countries that have made great strides in reducing poverty, especially since embarking on radical, liberalising economic reform. But India and China, always very different civilisations, have followed very different paths to growth. Under reform, they have converged somewhat in the past two decades, but will remain distinctive.

Take the way the two countries reacted to the recent deaths of two reformist leaders. India's P.V. Narasimha Rao, who died in December, was prime minister of India in 1991, when his government rescued the country from financial crisis and launched India's economic reforms. He served until 1996, but was later convicted of corruption. Although he won an appeal, the taint never quite left his name. His death, however, was marked by a state funeral and seven days of official mourning. The media vigorously debated his legacy.

When Zhao Ziyang, a former Chinese prime minister and head of the Communist Party, died three weeks later, he got just a couple of lines from the official news agency. He had been out of favour since siding with student protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square against hardliners in his own party in 1989. Dissidents were prevented from attending his funeral. It took two weeks to negotiate an official obituary. His successors, nervous that his memory might evoke the bloody suppression of the protests, did their best to erase it.

That India is an open society and China is not is one of the most glaring differences between the two. Some people in both countries are tempted to use it to explain another: that China's economy has grown much faster. This survey will argue that this view is simplistic and misleading.

Some of the main reasons for China's better performance have nothing to do with the political system. When China started its reforms, in 1978, it was poorer than India. Part of the gap now is due simply to that earlier start. But also, unreformed China seems to have done a more impressive job than India did in educating and providing health care for its poor. Reforms benefited from what economists call “good human capital”, and from a bulge in the working-age population that India itself is now experiencing.

In terms of integration into the global economy, the Chinese reforms have gone much further than India's have, and reaped bigger rewards. But India and China still face similar challenges. When George Fernandes, an Indian opposition politician who was defence minister in the previous government, visited China in 2003, he asked China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, to list his economic priorities. The answers—unemployment, regional disparities and the enduring poverty of farmers—applied just as much to India. Mr Fernandes, once known as a critic of China, concluded: “We are both sailing in the same boat.”

The two countries have much else in common. Both have massive populations with correspondingly massive needs for resources, especially land, water and energy. Both need to find ways of stemming environmental decay. Both suffer under-reported HIV infection rates. Both face potentially destabilising external disputes: China with America over Taiwan, India with Pakistan over Kashmir.

Both, moreover, have each other: as model or as warning, and as so far largely unexploited economic opportunity. This survey will argue that there are lessons India can draw from China's experience, but that the “Chinese model” need not mean anything resembling its political authoritarianism. In that respect, India has much to teach China.

India is often portrayed as an elephant: big, lumbering and slow off the mark. Now investment-bank reports are beginning to talk of it as a new Asian “tiger”. If that is what it wants to be, it makes sense for it to study China: the tiger in front is Chinese.